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How can we not be enraged to hear that a 14-year-old girl on Tues., Oct. 9, 2012, was shot in the head, with the obvious intent to kill. What was her crime? She wanted an education!

Wouldn’t Prophet Muhammed be outraged? The Prophet told the men who had just emerged from paganism that if they would just educate two daughters, they would earn paradise.

This was during a time when the Arabian peninsula still witnessed girl babies being buried alive merely because it was a girl and boy babies were considered more valuable to the family.

What Muslim would think that shooting a Muslim girl (or anyone) in the head because she valued her intellectual growth that she would go out against such harsh resistance to attain an education is going to gain him (or her) some special points with Allah?

Why would the Creator of Heaven and Earth sanction shooting a 14-year-old girl in the head because she wanted an education?

How many ways can this question be formed? How many angles can this phenomenon be views from that would give it some meaning? There is no meaning, there is no angle, there are no questions to be answered that would justify or explain away this horrendous assault on a human being.

Men are to be the maintainers of women, so what men would see their daughter shot in the head because she wants to go to school and not react in outrage?

First thought is to go to the Qur’an and read God’s Words, but anyone with a soul knows deep in their soul even if they are illiterate, unable to read, not in touch with the Word of God that this is a crime against women, against men who are born from women against sons of women, against humanity.

WHAT’S IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK (page 8) reports: “A 14-year old Pakistani activist who championed education for girls was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman.

Doctors removed a bullet from a Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban, as Pakistanis from across the political and religious spectrum united in revulsion at the attack on the 14-year-old education rights campaigner.

A Taliban gunman singled out and shot the girl, Malala Yousafzai, and a spokesman said it was in retaliation for her work in promoting girls’ education and children’s rights in the northwestern Swat Valley, near the Afghan border. One other girl was hurt in the attack.

Ms. Yousafzai was removed from immediate danger after the operation in a military hospital in Peshawar, during which surgeons removed a bullet that had passed through her head and lodged in her shoulder, one hospital official said.

Across the rest of the country, Pakistanis reacted with outrage to the attack on the girl, whose eloquent and determined advocacy of girls’ education had made her a powerful symbol of resistance to Taliban ideology.

Reportedly, Malala Yousafzai, who became famous for highlighting Taliban atrocities, was shot as she sat in a bus preparing to leave the school grounds in Mingora, the main city in the Swat valley which was the scene of intense fighting between the army and the Taliban in 2009.

Reportedly, a Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, claimed that the Taliban was responsible for the shootings. The teenager’s work had been deemed an “obscenity” that needed to be stopped.”

Reports claim that Fazal Maula Zahid, a member of Swat Qaumi Jirga, a local anti-Taliban group working for peace in the valley, said the gunman had asked which of the girls was Malala. When he could not be sure which of the girls was the intended target, he shot two girls.

Doctors said the gunshot wounds to her head and neck were serious and that she might have to be moved to a larger hospital in Islamabad or Peshawar.

Malala’s campaign for girls to get an education goes back to 2009 when she was just 9 years old. She had also spoken of her desire to set up her own political party and a vocational institute for marginalized girls in her area.

She had written an anonymous blog for the BBC about the burning of schools for girls. And she was recognized by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani with the Pakistani National Youth Peace Prize, the first of this award to be given to anyone.

It is reported that the remains a tradition of families to “exchange unmarried girls to settle feuds and debts,” although the practice is banned under Pakistani law.

The Prophet said, if you see a wrong try and change it with your hands. If you are too weak/unable to do so, then speak out against the wrong. And if you are too weak/unable to do that much, at least feel bad about it in your heart.

All of our hearts should be dragging the ground under the weigh of our paralyzing sorry that a young Muslim girl was shot in the head simply because she wanted to get an education. How barbaric, how un-Islamic; may Allah respond to the conditions that we find ourselves paralyzed under – we who call ourselves MUSLIMS!